I Be, But I Ain't

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Incandescent in her brutality & neon truth, Aziza Barnes writes her way into an urgent Black, wide & beautiful in its scream. You will find lightning here. You will discover a bruised constellation exploding in a vast black body. Her syllables devour the sweet hurt & harm of their own naked limbs & offer us a generous feast. Aziza Barnes is her own revolution, her own galactic orbit & oracle. She writes, 'In my own home I attempt nightly/to eat my body alive.' These poems suck their teeth & know their own desperate bones. She grieves, 'i done walked with a name i couldn't shake & now i gone.' Shaped and forged in powerful consciousness, Aziza Barnes possesses a gifted voice that will always be needed and necessary. The poems of this extraordinary debut sweat themselves Black with imagination and desire. In I BE, BUT I AIN'T, Barnes achieves both freedom & forgiveness in an ache that persists infinitely in its intelligence & intuition. Listen to her: 'I am ungloved in a sabbath of spit.'--Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Aziza Barnes's I BE, BUT I AIN'T is a powerful debut that refuses to stroke you soft or angle to be your best friend. Instead, these poems revel in the menagerie of their own discomfort, and ours. Barnes's is a wild imagination and her poems an ill grammar akin to Jayne Cortez's percussive surrealism of the body. Want a lolly pop? You won't get that here. Her poetic is challenging and sophisticated, in a language that refuses to assuage.--Dawn Lundy Martin

Author: Aziza Barnes
Publisher: YesYes Books
Published: 06/01/2016
Pages: 88
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.90w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781936919390


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/05/2016

About the Author
Barnes, Aziza: - Aziza Barnes is blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi. You can find her work currently or forthcoming in PANK, pluck!, Muzzle, Callaloo, Union Station, Phantom Limb, The Rumpus, The Offing, and The Breakbeat Poets, among other journals and collections. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published by Button Poetry. Her first full length collection of poems, I BE, BUT I AIN'T (2016), is the winner of the 2015 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books.

This title is not returnable